The following description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together with disclosures not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may be specifically pointed out, whereas other such contributions will be apparent from their context.
Frequency converters are used to change frequency and magnitude of electrical power supplied to a load. Frequency converters have been used in Alternating Current AC motor drives. In an exemplary, a frequency converter receives AC current from an electrical power supply and converts the frequency of the received AC current to another frequency after which the AC current is supplied to an AC electric motor. Also further parameters, for example a voltage level, of the received AC current may be changed. The AC motors are used in various applications including but not limited to fans and pumps. In many applications the use of frequency converters provides significant energy savings compared to supplying electrical power having a constant frequency.
Present frequency converters are configured to meet specific needs of their operating environment. The operating environment may be defined by the properties of electric motors driven by the frequency converters and application areas of the electric motors. Accordingly, the frequency converter may be configured by parameters that match a specific operating environment. These parameters may be defined by properties of the equipment the frequency converter drives either directly or indirectly, for example properties of the electric motors and pumps or fans driven by the electric motor.
Frequency converters may be added peripheral devices that add functionality to the frequency converter. Such peripheral devices may provide improved energy efficiency in a specific drive application or the peripherals may provide some other preferred additional feature. However, there exist a variety of peripherals and a variety of types of each peripheral, whereby installing a peripheral to a frequency converter involves configuring the frequency converter with correct parameters and in some cases updating the software of the frequency converter.
In practice, frequency converters may have thousands of parameters and macros that involve highly competent people to set correct operation of the frequency converter and/or peripherals added to the frequency converter. Thereby, configuring the frequency converter is a time consuming task and involves presence of the competent personnel at the location of the frequency converter. During the time the configuration of the frequency converter is incomplete, the applications are out of use and inefficiently used.